1 Introduction

1.1 TEX Live and the TEX Collection

This document describes the main features of the TEX Live software distribution — TEX and related programs
for GNU/Linux and other Unix flavors, Mac OS X, and Windows systems.

You may have acquired TEX Live by downloading, or on the TEX Collection DVD, which TEX user
groups distribute among their members, or in other ways. Section 2.1 briefly describes the contents of the
DVD. Both TEX Live and the TEX Collection are cooperative efforts by the TEX user groups. This document
mainly describes TEX Live itself.

TEX Live includes executables for TEX, LaTeX2e, ConTEXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX and many
other programs; an extensive collection of macros, fonts and documentation; and support for typesetting in
many different scripts from around the world.

For a brief summary of the major changes in this edition of TEX Live, see the end of the document,
section 9 (p. 75).

1.2 Operating system support

TEX Live contains binaries for many Unix-based platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X,
and Cygwin. The included sources can be compiled on platforms for which we do not provide
binaries.

As to Windows: Windows Vista and later are supported. Windows XP and 2000 will probably still mostly
work. There are no special 64-bit executables for Windows, but the 32-bit executables should run on 64-bit
systems.

1.3 Basic installation of TEX Live

You can install TEX Live either from DVD or over the Internet (http://tug.org/texlive/acquire.html).
The net installer itself is small, and downloads everything requested from the Internet.

The DVD installer lets you install to a local disk. You cannot run TEX Live directly from the
TEX Collection DVD (or its .iso image), but you can prepare a runnable installation on, e.g., a
USB stick (see section 4.2). Installation is described in later sections (p. 11), but here is a quick
start:

The installation script is named install-tl. It can operate in a “wizard mode” given the option
-gui=wizard (default for Windows), a text mode given -gui=text (default for everything else),
and an expert GUI mode given -gui=perltk.

One of the installed items is the ‘TEX Live Manager’ program, named tlmgr. Like the installer, it
can be used in both GUI mode and in text mode. You can use it to install and uninstall packages
and do various configuration tasks.

1.4 Security considerations

To the best of our knowledge, the core TEX programs themselves are (and always have been) extremely
robust. However, the contributed programs in TEX Live may not reach the same level, despite everyone’s best
efforts. As always, you should be careful when running programs on untrusted input; for maximum safety, use
a new subdirectory.

This need for care is especially urgent on Windows, since in general Windows finds programs in the current
directory before anything else, regardless of the search path. This opens up a wide variety of possible attacks.
We have closed many holes, but undoubtedly some remain, especially with third-party programs. Thus, we
recommend checking for suspicious files in the current directory, especially executables (binaries or scripts).
Ordinarily they should not be present, and definitely should not normally be created by merely processing a
document.

Finally, TEX (and its companion programs) are able to write files when processing documents, a feature
that can also be abused in a wide variety of ways. Again, processing unknown documents in a new subdirectory
is the safest bet.

1.5 Getting help

The TEX community is active and friendly, and most serious questions end up getting answered. However, the
support is informal, done by volunteers and casual readers, so it’s especially important that you do your
homework before asking. (If you prefer guaranteed commercial support, you can forgo TEX Live
completely and purchase a vendor’s system; http://tug.org/interest.html#vendors has a
list.)

Here is a list of resources, approximately in the order we recommend using them:

If you want to report a bug or have suggestions or comments on the TEX Live
distribution, installation, or documentation, the mailing list is tex-live@tug.org. However, if
your question is about how to use a particular program included in TEX Live, please write to
that program’s maintainer or mailing list. Often running a program with the --help option will
provide a bug reporting address.

The other side of the coin is helping others who have questions. Both comp.text.tex and texhax are open
to anyone, so feel free to join, start reading, and help out where you can.

2 Overview of TEX Live

This section describes the contents of TEX Live and the TEX Collection of which it is a part.

2.1 The TEX Collection: TEX Live, proTEXt, MacTEX

for Mac OS X, this adds a native Mac OS X installer and other Mac applications to TEX
Live. Home page: http://tug.org/mactex/.

proTEXt

An enhancement of the MiKTEX distribution for Windows, proTEXt adds a few extra
tools to MiKTEX, and simplifies installation. It is entirely independent of TEX Live, and has its
own installation instructions. Home page: http://tug.org/protext/.

CTAN and protext do not follow the same copying conditions as TEX Live, so be careful when
redistributing or modifying.

2.2 Top level TEX Live directories

Here is a brief listing and description of the top level directories in a TEX Live installation.

bin

The TEX system programs, arranged by platform.

readme-*.dir

Quick overview and useful links for TEX Live, in various languages, in both HTML and plain
text.

source

The source to all included programs, including the main Web2C-based TEX distributions.

texmf-dist

The principal tree; see TEXMFDIST below.

tlpkg

Scripts, programs and data for managing the installation, and special support for Windows.

In addition to the directories above, the installation scripts and README files (in various languages) are at
the top level of the distribution.

For documentation, the comprehensive links in the top-level file doc.html may be helpful. The
documentation for nearly everything (packages, formats, fonts, program manuals, man pages, Info
files) is in texmf-dist/doc. You can use the texdoc program to find documentation wherever it is
located.

This TEX Live documentation itself is in texmf-dist/doc/texlive, available in several languages:

2.3 Overview of the predefined texmf trees

This section lists the predefined variables specifying the texmf trees used by the system, and their intended
purpose, and the default layout of TEX Live. The command tlmgr conf shows the values of
these variables, so that you can easily find out how they map to particular directories in your
installation.

All of the trees, including the personal ones, should follow the TEX Directory Structure (TDS,
http://tug.org/tds), with all its myriad subdirectories, or files may not be found. Section 3.4.6 (p. 41)
describes this in more detail.

TEXMFDIST

The tree which holds nearly all of the files in the original distribution—configuration files, scripts,
packages, fonts, etc. (The main exception are the per-platform executables, which are stored in a
sibling directory bin/.)

TEXMFLOCAL

The tree which administrators can use for system-wide installation of additional or updated
macros, fonts, etc.

TEXMFHOME

The tree which users can use for their own individual installations of additional or updated macros,
fonts, etc. The expansion of this variable dynamically adjusts for each user to their own individual
directory.

TEXMFCONFIG

The (personal) tree used by the utilities texconfig, updmap, and fmtutil to store modified
configuration data.

TEXMFSYSCONFIG

The (site-wide) tree used by the utilities texconfig-sys, updmap-sys, and fmtutil-sys to store
modified configuration data.

TEXMFVAR

The (personal) tree used by texconfig, updmap and fmtutil to store (cached) runtime data such
as format files and generated map files.

TEXMFSYSVAR

The (site-wide) tree used by texconfig-sys, updmap-sys and fmtutil-sys, and also by tlmgr,
to store (cached) runtime data such as format files and generated map files.

TEXMFCACHE

The tree(s) used by ConTEXt MkIV and LuaLATEX to store (cached) runtime data; defaults
to TEXMFSYSVAR, or (if that’s not writable), TEXMFVAR.

The default layout is:

system-wide root

can span multiple TEX Live releases:

2015

A previous release.

2016

The current release.

bin

i386-linux

GNU/Linux binaries

...

universal-darwin

Mac OS X binaries

win32

Windows binaries

texmf-dist

TEXMFDIST and TEXMFMAIN

texmf-var

TEXMFSYSVAR, TEXMFCACHE

texmf-config

TEXMFSYSCONFIG

texmf-local

TEXMFLOCAL, intended to be retained from release to release.

user’s home directory

($HOME or %USERPROFILE%)

.texlive2015

Privately generated and configuration data for a previous release.

.texlive2016

Privately generated and configuration data for the current release.

texmf-var

TEXMFVAR, TEXMFCACHE

texmf-config

TEXMFCONFIG

texmf

TEXMFHOME Personal macros, etc.

2.4 Extensions to TEX

Knuth’s original TEX itself is frozen, apart from rare bug fixes. It is present in TEX Live as the program tex,
and will remain so for the foreseeable future. TEX Live also contains several extended versions of TEX (also
known as TEX engines):

e-TEX

adds a set of new primitives (related to macro expansion, character scanning, classes
of marks, additional debugging features, and more) and the TEX--XE T extensions for
bidirectional typesetting. In default mode, e-TEX is 100% compatible with ordinary TEX. See
texmf-dist/doc/etex/base/etex_man.pdf.

is the designated successor of pdfTEX, and is mostly (but not entirely) backward-compatible.
It is also intended to be a functional superset of Aleph (see below), though technical compatibility
is not intended. The incorporated Lua interpreter (http://www.lua.org/) enables elegant
solutions for many thorny TEX problems. When called as texlua, it functions as a standalone Lua
interpreter, and is already used as such within TEX Live. Its web site is http://www.luatex.org/,
and the reference manual is texmf-dist/doc/luatex/base/luatex.pdf.

XeTEX

adds support for Unicode input and OpenType- and system fonts, implemented using standard
third-party libraries. See http://tug.org/xetex.

Omega (Omega)

is based on Unicode (16-bit characters), thus supports working with almost all the
world’s scripts simultaneously. It also supports so-called ‘Omega Translation Processes’ (OTPs),
for performing complex transformations on arbitrary input. Omega is no longer included in TEX
Live as a separate program; only Aleph is provided:

3 Installation

3.1 Starting the installer

To begin, get the TEX Collection DVD or download the TEX Live net installer. See
http://tug.org/texlive/acquire.html for more information and other methods of getting the
software.

Net installer, .zip or .tar.gz:

Download from CTAN, under systems/texlive/tlnet; the url
http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet should redirect to a nearby, up-to-date,
mirror. You can retrieve either install-tl.zip which can be used under Unix and Windows, or
the considerably smaller install-unx.tar.gz for Unix only. After unpacking, install-tl and
install-tl-windows.bat will be in the install-tl subdirectory.

Net installer, Windows .exe:

Download from CTAN as above, and double-click. This starts up a
first-stage installer and unpacker; see Figure 1. It gives three choices: “Simple install” starts up
the wizard installer, “Custom install” the expert GUI installer, as described in section 3.1.3. A
third option is just unpacking.

TEXCollection DVD:

go to the DVD’s texlive subdirectory. Under Windows, the installer
normally starts automatically when you insert the DVD. You can get the DVD by becoming
a member of a TEX user group (highly recommended, http://tug.org/usergroups.html), or
purchasing it separately (http://tug.org/store), or burning your own from the ISO image.
You can also mount the ISO directly on most systems. After installing from DVD or ISO, if you
want to get continuing updates from the Internet, please see 3.4.3.

Figure 1: First stage of Windows .exe installer

The same installer program is run, whatever the source. The most visible difference between the two is that
with the net installer, what you end up with is the packages that are currently available. This
is in contrast to the DVD and ISO images, which are not updated between the major public
releases.

If you need to download through proxies, use a ~/.wgetrc file or environment variables with the proxy
settings for Wget (http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/html_node/Proxies.html). TEX Live
always uses GNU Wget to download. Of course, this should not matter if you are installing from the DVD or
ISO image.

The following sections explain installer start-up in more detail.

3.1.1 Unix

Below, > denotes the shell prompt; user input is bold. The script install-tl is a Perl script. The simplest
way to start it on a Unix-compatible system is as follows:

>perl /path/to/installer/install-tl

(Or you can invoke /path/to/installer/install-tl if it stayed executable, or cd to the directory first, etc.;
we won’t repeat all the variations.) You may have to enlarge your terminal window so that it shows the full
text installer screen (Figure 2).

To install in expert GUI mode (figure 3), you’ll need the Perl::TK module compiled with XFT support,
which is generally the case with GNU/Linux, but often not so with other systems. Given that, you can run:

>perl install-tl -gui

For a complete listing of the various options:

>perl install-tl -help

Warning about Unix permissions: Your umask at the time of installation will be respected by the TEX
Live installer. Therefore, if you want your installation to be usable by users other than you, make sure your
setting is sufficiently permissive, for instance, umask 002. For more information about umask, consult your
system documentation.

Special considerations for Cygwin: Unlike other Unix-compatible systems, Cygwin does
not by default include all of the prerequisite programs needed by the TEX Live installer. See
Section 3.1.4.

3.1.2 Mac OS X

As mentioned in section 2.1, a separate distribution is prepared for Mac OS X, named
MacTEX (http://tug.org/mactex). We recommend using the native MacTEX installer instead of the TEX
Live installer on Mac OS X, because the native installer makes a few Mac-specific adjustments, in particular to
allow easily switching between the various TEX distributions for Mac OS X (MacTEX, Fink, MacPorts, …)
using the so-called TEXDist data structure.

MacTEX is firmly based on TEX Live, and the main TEX trees and binaries are precisely the same. It
adds a few extra folders with Mac-specific documentation and applications.

3.1.3 Windows

If you are using the unpacked downloaded zip file, or the DVD installer failed to start automatically,
double-click install-tl-windows.bat. If you want more customization options, e.g., selection of specific
package collections, run install-tl-advanced.bat instead.

You can also start the installer from the command-prompt. Below, > denotes the prompt; user input is
bold. If you are in the installer directory, run just:

>install-tl-windows

Or you can invoke it with an absolute location, such as:

>D:\texlive\install-tl-windows

for the TEX Collection DVD, supposing that D: is the optical drive. Figure 4 displays the wizard installer,
which is the default for Windows.

3.1.4 Cygwin

Before beginning the installation, use Cygwin’s setup.exe program to install the perl and wget packages if
you have not already done so. The following additional packages are recommended:

fontconfig [needed by XeTEX and LuaTEX]

ghostscript [needed by various utilities]

libXaw7 [needed by xdvi]

ncurses [provides the clear command used by the installer]

3.1.5 The text installer

Figure 2 displays the main text mode screen under Unix. The text installer is the default on
Unix.

This is only a command-line installer; there is no cursor support at all. For instance, you cannot
tab around checkboxes or input fields. You just type something (case-sensitive) at the prompt
and press the Enter key, and then the entire terminal screen will be rewritten, with adjusted
content.

The text installer interface is this primitive for a reason: it is designed to run on as many platforms as
possible, even with a very barebones Perl.

3.1.6 The expert graphical installer

Figure 3 displays the expert graphical installer under GNU/Linux. Other than using buttons and menus, this
does not differ much from the text installer.

This mode can be invoked explicitly with

>install-tl -gui=perltk

3.1.7 The simple wizard installer

Under Windows, the default is to run the simplest installation method we could devise, called the “wizard”
installer (figure 4). It installs everything and asks almost no questions. If you want to customize your setup,
you should run one of the other installers.

On other platforms, this mode can be invoked explicitly with

>install-tl -gui=wizard

3.2 Running the installer

The installer is intended to be mostly self-explanatory, but following are a few notes about the various options
and submenus.

Figure 5 displays the text mode binaries menu. By default, only the binaries for your current platform will
be installed. From this menu, you can select installation of binaries for other platforms as well. This can be
useful if you are sharing a TEX tree across a network of heterogeneous machines, or for a dual-boot
system.

Figure 6 displays the TEX Live scheme menu; from here, you choose a “scheme”, which is an overall set of
package collections. The default full scheme installs everything available. This is recommended, but you
can also choose the basic scheme for a small system, minimal for testing purposes, and medium
or teTeX to get something in between. There are also various specialized and country-specific
schemes.

Figure 7: Collections menu

You can refine your scheme selection with the ‘collections’ menu (figure 7, shown in GUI mode for a
change).

Collections are one level more detailed than schemes — in essence, a scheme consists of several collections, a
collection consists of one or more packages, and a package (the lowest level grouping in TEX Live) contains the
actual TEX macro files, font files, and so on.

If you want more control than the collection menus provide, you can use the TEX Live Manager (tlmgr)
program after installation (see section 5); using that, you can control the installation at the package
level.

3.2.3 Directories

The default layout is described in section 2.3, p. 8. The default installation directory is /usr/local/texlive/2016
on Unix and %SystemDrive%\texlive\2016 on Windows. This arrangement enables having many parallel
TEX Live installations, such as one for each release (typically by year, as here), and you can switch between
them merely by altering your search path.

That installation directory can be overridden by setting the so-called TEXDIR in the installer. The
GUI screen for this and other options is shown in figure 3. The most common reasons to change it are either
lacking enough disk space in that partition (the full TEX Live needs several gigabytes), or lacking write
permission for the default location (you don’t have to be root or administrator to install TEX Live, but you do
need write access to the target directory).

The installation directories can also be changed by setting a variety of environment variables before running
the installer (most likely, TEXLIVE_INSTALL_PREFIX or TEXLIVE_INSTALL_TEXDIR); see the documentation
from install-tl --help (available online at http://tug.org/texlive/doc/install-tl.html) for the full
list and more details.

A reasonable alternative destination is a directory under your home, especially if you will be the sole user.
Use ‘~’ to indicate this, as in ‘~/texlive/2016’.

We recommend including the year in the name, to enable keeping different releases of TEX Live side by
side. (You may wish to also maintain a version-independent name, such as /usr/local/texlive-cur, via a
symbolic link, which you can then repoint after testing the new release.)

Changing TEXDIR in the installer will also change TEXMFLOCAL, TEXMFSYSVAR and TEXMFSYSCONFIG.

TEXMFHOME is the recommended location for personal macro files or packages. The default value is ~/texmf.
In contrast to TEXDIR, here a ~ is preserved in the newly-written configuration files, since it usefully refers to
the home directory of the user running TEX. It expands to $HOME on Unix and %USERPROFILE% on Windows.
Special redundant note: TEXMFHOME, like all trees, must be organized according to the TDS, or files may not be
found.

TEXMFVAR is the location for storing most cached runtime data specific to each user. TEXMFCACHE is the
variable name used for that purpose by LuaLATEXand ConTEXt MkIV (see section 3.4.5, p. 41); its default
value is TEXMFSYSVAR, or (if that’s not writable), TEXMFVAR.

The default paper size selection. Of course, individual
documents can and should specify a specific paper size, if desired.

execution of restricted list of programs:

As of TEX Live 2010, execution of a few external
programs is allowed by default. The (very short) list of allowed programs is given in the texmf.cnf.
See the 2010 news (section 9.1.7) for more details.

create format files:

Although unnecessary format files take time to generate and disk space to store,
it is still recommended to leave this option checked: if you don’t, then format files will be generated
in people’s private TEXMFVAR tree as they are needed. In that location, they will not be updated
automatically if (say) binaries or hyphenation patterns are updated in the installation, and thus
you could end up with incompatible format files.

install font/macro … tree:

Omit downloading/installing the documentation and source files
included in most packages. Not recommended.

create symlinks in standard directories:

This option (Unix only) bypasses the need to change
environment variables. Without this option, TEX Live directories usually have to be added to
PATH, MANPATH and INFOPATH. You will need write permissions to the target directories. It is
strongly advised not to overwrite a TEX system that came with your system with this option. It
is intended primarily for accessing the TEX system through directories that are already known
to users, such as /usr/local/bin, which don’t already contain any TEX files.

after installation … CTAN:

When installing from DVD, this option is enabled by default, since
usually one wants to take any subsequent package updates from the CTAN area that is updated
throughout the year. The only likely reason to disable it is if you install only a subset from the
DVD and plan to augment the installation later. In any case, the package repository for the
installer, and for updates after installation, can be set independently as needed; see section 3.3.1
and section 3.4.3.

When all the settings are to your liking, you can type ‘I’ to start the installation process. When it is done,
skip to section 3.4 to read what else needs to be done, if anything.

3.3 Command-line install-tl options

Type

>install-tl -help

for a listing of command-line options. Either - or -- can be used to introduce option names. These are the
most common ones:

-gui

If possible, use the GUI installer. This requires the
Perl/Tk module (http://tug.org/texlive/distro.html#perltk) compiled with XFT support;
if Perl/Tk is not available, installation continues in text mode.

-no-gui

Force using the text mode installer, even under Windows.

-lang LL

Specify the installer interface language as a standard (usually two-letter) code. The installer tries
to automatically determine the right language but if it fails, or if the right language is not available,
then it uses English as a fallback. Run install-tl --help to get the list of available languages.

-portable

Install for portable use on, e.g., a USB stick. Also selectable from within the text installer with
the V command, and from the GUI installer. See section 4.2.

-profile file

Load the installation profile file and do the installation with no user interaction. The installer
always writes a file texlive.profile to the tlpkg subdirectory of your installation. That file can
be given as the argument to redo the exact same installation on a different system, for example.
Alternatively, you can use a custom profile, most easily created by starting from a generated one
and changing values, or an empty file, which will take all the defaults.

-repository url-or-directory

Specify package repository from which to install; see following.

-in-place

(Documented only for completeness: Do not use this unless you know what you
are doing.) If you already have an rsync, svn, or other copy of TEX Live (see
http://tug.org/texlive/acquire-mirror.html) then this option will use what you’ve got,
as-is, and do only the necessary post-install. Be warned that the file tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb may
be overwritten; saving it is your responsibility. Also, package removal has to be done manually.
This option cannot be toggled via the installer interface.

3.3.1 The -repository option

If you want to override that, the location value can be a url starting with ftp:, http:, or file:/, or a
plain directory path. (When giving an http: or ftp: location, trailing ‘/’ characters and/or a trailing
‘/tlpkg’ component are ignored.)

If the given argument is local (either a path or a file:/ url), compressed files in an archive subdirectory
of the repository path are used (even if uncompressed files are available as well).

3.4 Post-install actions

Some post-installation may be required.

3.4.1 Environment variables for Unix

If you elected to create symlinks in standard directories (described in section 3.2.4), then there is no
need to edit environment variables. Otherwise, on Unix systems, the directory of the binaries
for your platform must be added to the search path. (On Windows, the installer takes care of
this.)

Each supported platform has its own subdirectory under TEXDIR/bin. See figure 5 for the list of
subdirectories and corresponding platforms.

Optionally, you can also add the documentation man and Info directories to their respective search paths, if
you want the system tools to find them. The man pages might be found automatically after the addition to
PATH.

For Bourne-compatible shells such as bash, and using Intel x86 GNU/Linux and a default directory setup as
an example, the file to edit might be $HOME/.profile (or another file sourced by .profile, and the lines to
add would look like this:

If you already have settings somewhere in your “dot” files, naturally the TEX Live directories should be
merged in as appropriate.

3.4.2 Environment variables: Global configuration

If you want to make these changes globally, or for a user newly added to the system, then you are on
your own; there is just too much variation between systems in how and where these things are
configured.

Our two hints are: 1) you may want to check for a file /etc/manpath.config and, if present, add lines
such as

And 2) check for a file /etc/environment which may define the search path and other default environment
variables.

In each (Unix) binary directory, we also create a symbolic link named man to the directory
texmf-dist/doc/man. Some man programs, such as the standard Mac OS X man, will automatically find that,
obviating the need for any man page setup.

3.4.3 Internet updates after DVD installation

If you installed TEX Live from DVD and then wish to get updates from the Internet, you need to run this
command—after you’ve updated your search path (as described in the previous section):

>tlmgr option repository http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet

This tells tlmgr to use a nearby CTAN mirror for future updates. This is done by default when installing
from DVD, via the option described in section 3.2.4.

If there are problems with the automatic mirror selection, you can specify a particular CTAN mirror from
the list at http://ctan.org/mirrors. Use the exact path to the tlnet subdir on that mirror, as shown
above.

3.4.4 System font configuration for XeTEX and LuaTEX

XeTEX and LuaTEX can use any font installed on the system, not just those in the TEX trees. They do
these via related but not identical methods.

On Windows, fonts shipped with TEX Live are automatically made available to XeTEX by font name. On
Mac OS X, supporting font name lookups requires additional steps; please see the MacTEX web pages
(http://tug.org/mactex). For other Unix systems, the procedure to be able to find the fonts shipped with
TEX Live via font name follows.

To facilitate this, when the xetex package is installed (either at initial installation or later), the necessary
configuration file is created in TEXMFSYSVAR/fonts/conf/texlive-fontconfig.conf.

To set up the TEX Live fonts for system-wide use (assuming you have suitable privileges), proceed as
follows:

Copy the texlive-fontconfig.conf file to /etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive.conf.

Run fc-cache -fsv.

If you do not have sufficient privileges to carry out the steps above, or if you want to make the TEX Live
fonts available to only one user, you can do the following:

Copy the texlive-fontconfig.conf file to ~/.fonts.conf, where ~ is your home directory.

Run fc-cache -fv.

You can run fc-list to see the names of the system fonts. The incantation fc-list : family stylefile spacing (all arguments are literal strings) shows some generally interesting information.

3.4.5 ConTEXt Mark IV

Both the ‘old’ ConTEXt (Mark II) and the ‘new’ ConTEXt (Mark IV) should run out of the box after TEX
Live installation, and should need no special attention as long as you stick to using tlmgr for
updates.

However, because ConTEXt MkIV does not use the kpathsea library, some setup will be required whenever
you install new files manually (without using tlmgr). After each such installation, each MkIV user must
run:

context --generate

to refresh the ConTEXt disk cache data. The resulting files are stored under TEXMFCACHE. whose default value in
TEX Live is TEXMSYSVAR;TEXMFVAR.

ConTEXt MkIV will read from all paths mentioned in TEXMFCACHE, and write to the first path that is
writable. While reading, the last found match will take precedence in the case of duplicated cache
data.

3.4.6 Integrating local and personal macros

This is already mentioned implicitly in section 2.3: TEXMFLOCAL (by default, /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local
or %SystemDrive%\texlive\texmf-local on Windows) is intended for system-wide local fonts and macros;
and TEXMFHOME (by default, $HOME/texmf or %USERPROFILE%\texmf), is for personal fonts and macros. These
directories are intended to stick around from release to release, and have their content seen automatically by a
new TEX Live release. Therefore, it is best to refrain from changing the definition of TEXMFLOCAL to
be too far away from the main TEX Live directory, or you will need to manually change future
releases.

For both trees, files should be placed in their proper TEX Directory Structure (TDS) subdirectories; see
http://tug.org/tds or consult texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf. For instance, a LATEX class file or
package should be placed in TEXMFLOCAL/tex/latex or TEXMFHOME/tex/latex, or a subdirectory
thereof.

TEXMFLOCAL requires an up-to-date filename database, or files will not be found. You can update it with the
command mktexlsr or use the ‘Reinit file database’ button on the configuration tab of the TEX Live Manager
GUI.

By default, each of these variables is defined to be a single directory, as shown. This is not a hard-and-fast
requirement. If you need to easily switch back and forth between different versions of large packages, for
example, you can maintain multiple trees for your own purposes. This is done by setting TEXMFHOME to the list
of directories, within braces, separated by commas:

3.4.7 Integrating third-party fonts

This is unfortunately a messy topic. Forget about it unless you want to delve into many details of the TEX
installation. Many fonts are included in TEX Live already, so take a look if you don’t already know that what
you want isn’t there.

A possible alternative is to use XeTEX or LuaTEX (see section 2.4), which let you use operating system
fonts without any installation in TEX.

3.5 Testing the installation

After installing TEX Live, you naturally want to test it out, so you can start creating beautiful documents
and/or fonts.

One thing you may immediately be looking for is a front-end with which to edit files. TEX Live installs
TEXworks (http://tug.org/texworks) on Windows (only), and MacTEX installs TeXShop
(http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop. On other Unix systems, it’s left up to you to choose an
editor. There are many choices available, some of which are listed in the next section; see also
http://tug.org/interest.html#editors. Any plain text editor will work; something TEX-specific is not
required.

The rest of this section gives some basic procedures for testing that the new system is functional. We give
Unix commands here; under Mac OS X and Windows, you’re more likely to run the tests through a graphical
interface, but the principles are the same.

If this comes back with ‘command not found’ instead of version and copyright information, or with an
older version, most likely you don’t have the correct bin subdirectory in your PATH. See the
environment-setting information on p. 39.

Process a basic LATEX file:

>latex sample2e.texThis is pdfTeX 3.14......Output written on sample2e.dvi (3 pages, 7484 bytes).Transcript written on sample2e.log.

If this fails to find sample2e.tex or other files, most likely you have interference from old environment
variables or configuration files; we recommend unsetting all TEX-related environment variables for a
start. (For a deep analysis, you can ask TEX to report on exactly what it is searching for, and finding;
see “Debugging actions” on page 68.)

Preview the result online:

>xdvi sample2e.dvi # Unix>dviout sample2e.dvi # Windows

You should see a new window with a nice document explaining some of the basics of LATEX. (Well
worth reading, by the way, if you’re new to TEX.) You do have to be running under X for xdvi to work; if
you’re not, or your DISPLAY environment variable is set incorrectly, you’ll get an error ‘Can’t opendisplay’.

Create a PostScript file for printing or display:

>dvips sample2e.dvi -o sample2e.ps

Create a PDF file instead of DVI; this processes the .tex file and writes PDF directly:

4 Specialized installations

The previous sections described the basic installation process. Here we turn to some specialized
cases.

4.1 Shared-user (or cross-machine) installations

TEX Live has been designed to be sharable between different users on one system, and/or between
different systems on a network. With a standard directory layout, no hard paths are configured: the
locations for files needed by TEX Live programs are found relative to the programs. You can see
this in the principal configuration file $TEXMFDIST/web2c/texmf.cnf, which contains lines such
as

This means that adding the directory for TEX Live executables for their platform to their search path is sufficient
to get a working setup.

By the same token, you can also install TEX Live locally and then move the entire hierarchy afterwards to
a network location.

For Windows, a launcher tlaunch is available at http://tug.org/texlive/w32client.html. Its main
window contains menu entries and buttons for various TEX-related programs and documentation.

On first use, it modifies the searchpath for TEX Live and creates some file associations. It also creates
a Start menu entry to undo these configurations, in addition to such an entry in the launcher
menu.

All this is set up in an ini file. You can add yourself entries for e.g. SumatraPDF or some LATEX-editor.
See the web page above for more information.

4.2 Portable (USB) installations

The -portable installer option (or V command in the text installer or corresponding GUI option)
creates a completely self-contained TEX Live installation under a common root and forgoes system
integration. You can create such an installation directly on a USB stick, or copy it to a USB stick
afterwards.

To run TEX using this portable installation, you need to add the appropriate binary directory
to the search path during your terminal session, as usual. On Windows, you can double-click
tl-tray-menu at the root of the installation to choose between a few common tasks, as shown in this
screenshot:

The ‘More…’ entry explains how you can customize this menu.

4.3 ISO (or DVD) installations

If you don’t need to update or otherwise modify your installation often, and/or have several systems on
which to use TEX Live, it may be convenient to create an ISO of your TEX Live installation,
because:

Copying an ISO between different computers is much faster than copying a normal installation.

If you are dual-booting between different operating systems and want them to share a TEX Live
installation, an ISO installation is not tied to the idiosyncrasies and limitations of other mutually
supported filesystems (FAT32, NTFS, HFS+).

Virtual machines can simply mount such an ISO.

Of course you can also burn an ISO to DVD, if that is useful for you.

Desktop GNU/Linux/Unix systems, including Mac OS X, are able to mount an ISO. Windows 8 is the
first(!) Windows version which can do this. Apart from that, nothing changes compared to a normal hard disk
installation, see section 3.4.1.

When preparing such an ISO installation, it is best to omit the subdirectory for the release year, and have
texmf-local at the same level as the other trees (texmf-dist, texmf-var, etc.). You can do this with the
normal directory options in the installer.

For a physical (rather than virtual) Windows system, you can burn the ISO to DVD. However, it
may be worth your while to investigate free ISO-mounting options such as WinCDEmu at
http://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/.

For Windows system integration, you can include the w32client scripts described in section 4.1 and at
http://tug.org/texlive/w32client.html, which work just as well for an ISO as for a network
installation.

On Mac OS X, TeXShop will be able to use the DVD installation if a symlink /usr/texbin points to the
appropriate binary directory, e.g.,

sudo ln -s /Volumes/MyTeXLive/bin/universal-darwin /usr/texbin

Historical note: TEX Live 2010 was the first TEX Live edition which was no longer distributed ‘live’.
However, it always required some acrobatics to run from DVD or ISO; in particular, there was no way around
setting at least one extra environment variable. If you create your ISO from an existing installation then there
is no need for this.

5 tlmgr: Managing your installation

Figure 9: tlmgr in GUI mode: main window, after ‘Load’.

Figure 10: tlmgr in GUI mode: General options

Figure 11: tlmgr in GUI mode: Paper
size options

TEX Live includes a program named tlmgr for managing TEX Live after the initial installation. Its
capabilities include:

5.1 tlmgr GUI mode

or in Windows via the Start menu: Start, Programs, TeX Live ..., TeX Live Manager. After clicking ‘Load’
it displays a list of available and installed packages. This assumes of course that the installation source is valid
and reachable.

As you can see, tlmgr installs dependencies, and takes care of any necessary post-install actions, including
updating the filename database and (re)generating formats. In the above, we generated new formats for
XeTEX.

6 Notes on Windows

6.1 Windows-specific features

A new ‘TEX Live’ submenu of the Start menu is installed, which contains
entries for some GUI programs (tlmgr, texdoctk, the PS_View (psv) PostScript previewer) and
some documentation.

File associations.

If enabled, TeXworks, Dviout and PS_view become either the default program for
their respective filetypes, or get an entry in the ‘Open with’ right-click menus of those filetypes.

Bitmap to eps converter.

Various bitmapped formats get an entry bitmap2eps in their ‘Open with’
right-click menu. Bitmap2eps is a simple script which lets sam2p or bmeps do the real work.

Automatic path adjustment.

No manual configuration steps are required.

Uninstaller.

The installer creates an entry under ‘Add/Remove Programs’ for TEX Live. The uninstall
tab of the TEX Live Manager GUI refers to this. For a single-user install, the installer also creates
an uninstall entry under the Start menu.

Write-protect.

For an admin install, the TEX Live directories are write-protected, at least if TEX
Live is installed on a normal NTFS-formatted non-removable disk.

6.2 Additional software included on Windows

To be complete, a TEX Live installation needs support packages that are not commonly found on a Windows
machine. TEX Live provides the missing pieces. These programs are all installed as part of TEX Live only on
Windows.

Perl and Ghostscript.

Because of the importance of Perl and Ghostscript, TEX Live includes
‘hidden’ copies of these programs. TEX Live programs that need them know where to find them,
but they don’t betray their presence through environment variables or registry settings. They
aren’t full-scale installations, and shouldn’t interfere with any system installations of Perl or
Ghostscript.

PS_View.

Also installed is PS_View, a PostScript and PDF viewer; see figure 12.

Figure 12: PS_View: very high magnifications available!

dviout.

Also installed is dviout, a DVI viewer. At first, when you preview files with dviout, it will create fonts,
because screen fonts were not installed. After a while, you will have created most of the fonts you use,
and you will rarely see the font-creation window. More information can be found in the (highly
recommended) on-line help.

TEXworks.

TEXworks is a TEX-oriented editor with an integrated PDF viewer.

Command-line tools.

A number of Windows ports of common Unix command-line programs
are installed along with the usual TEX Live binaries. These include gzip, unzip and the
utilities from the xpdf suite (pdfinfo, pdffonts, …). The xpdf viewer itself is not available for
Windows. Instead, you can download the Sumatra PDF viewer, which is based on xpdf, from
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf, among other options.

fc-list, fc-cache, …

The tools from the fontconfig library allow XeTEX to handle system fonts on Windows.
You can use fc-list to determine the font names to pass to XeTEX’s extended \font command. If
necessary, run fc-cache first to update font information.

6.3 User Profile is Home

The Windows counterpart of a Unix home directory is the %USERPROFILE% directory. Under Windows XP, this
is usually C:\Documents and Settings\<username>, and under Windows Vista and later it is
C:\Users\<username>. In the texmf.cnf file, and Kpathsea in general, ~ will expand appropriately on both
Windows and Unix.

6.4 The Windows registry

Windows stores nearly all configuration data in its registry. The registry contains a set of hierarchically
organized keys, with several root keys. The most important ones for installation programs are
HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, HKCU and HKLM in short. The HKCU part of the registry is in
the user’s home directory (see section 6.3). HKLM is normally in a subdirectory of the Windows
directory.

In some cases, system information could be obtained from environment variables but for other information,
for example the location of shortcuts, it is necessary to consult the registry. Setting environment variables
permanently also requires registry access.

6.5 Windows permissions

In later versions of Windows, a distinction is made between regular users and administrators, where only the
latter have free access to the entire operating system. We have made an effort to make TEX Live installable
without administrative privileges.

If the installer is started with administrative permissions, there is an option to install for all users. If this
option is chosen, shortcuts are created for all users, and the system environment is modified.
Otherwise, shortcuts and menu entries are created for the current user, and the user environment is
modified.

Regardless of administrator status, the default root of TEX Live proposed by the installer is always
under %SystemDrive%. The installer always tests whether the root is writable for the current
user.

A problem may arise if the user is not an administrator and TEX already exists in the search path. Since
the effective path consists of the system path followed by the user path, the new TEX Live would
never get precedence. As a safeguard, the installer creates a shortcut to the command-prompt in
which the new TEX Live binary directory is prepended to the local search path. The new TEX
Live will be always usable from within such a command-prompt. The shortcut for TEXworks, if
installed, also prepends TEX Live to the search path, so it should also be immune to this path
problem.

For Windows Vista and later, you should be aware that even if you are logged in as administrator, you need
to explicitly ask for administrator privileges. In fact, there is not much point in logging in as administrator.
Instead, right-clicking on the program or shortcut that you want to run usually gives you a choice ‘Run as
administrator’.

6.6 Increasing maximum memory on Windows and Cygwin

Windows and Cygwin (see section 3.1.4 for Cygwin installation specifics) users may find that they run out of
memory when running some of the programs shipped with TEX Live. For example, asy might run out of
memory if you try to allocate an array of 25,000,000 reals, and LuaTEX might run out of memory if you try to
process a document with a lot of big fonts.

and then execute the command regedit /s moremem.reg as administrator. (If you want to change memory
only for the current user instead of system-wide, use HKEY_CURRENT_USER.)

7 A user’s guide to Web2C

Web2C is an integrated collection of TEX-related programs: TEX itself, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX, etc.
It is the heart of TEX Live. The home page for Web2C, with the current manual and more, is
http://tug.org/web2c.

A bit of history: The original implementation was by Tomas Rokicki who, in 1987, developed a first
TEX-to-C system based on change files under Unix, which were primarily the original work of Howard
Trickey and Pavel Curtis. Tim Morgan became the maintainer of the system, and during this period
the name changed to Web-to-C. In 1990, Karl Berry took over the work, assisted by dozens of
additional contributors, and in 1997 he handed the baton to Olaf Weber, who returned it to Karl in
2006.

The Web2C system runs on Unix, 32-bit Windows systems, Mac OS X, and other operating systems. It uses
Knuth’s original sources for TEX and other basic programs written in the WEB literate programming
system and translates them into C source code. The core TEX programs handled in this way
are:

bibtex

Maintaining bibliographies.

dvicopy

Expands virtual font references in DVI files.

dvitomp

DVI to MPX (MetaPost pictures).

dvitype

DVI to human-readable text.

gftodvi

Generic font proofsheets.

gftopk

Generic to packed fonts.

gftype

GF to human-readable text.

mf

Creating typeface families.

mft

Prettyprinting Metafont source.

mpost

Creating technical diagrams.

patgen

Creating hyphenation patterns.

pktogf

Packed to generic fonts.

pktype

PK to human-readable text.

pltotf

Plain text property list to TFM.

pooltype

Display WEB pool files.

tangle

WEB to Pascal.

tex

Typesetting.

tftopl

TFM to plain text property list.

vftovp

Virtual font to virtual property list.

vptovf

Virtual property list to virtual font.

weave

WEB to TEX.

The precise functions and syntax of these programs are described in the documentation of the individual
packages and of Web2C itself. However, knowing a few principles governing the whole family of programs will
help you take advantage of your Web2C installation.

All programs honor these standard GNU options:

--help

print basic usage summary.

--verbose

print detailed progress report.

--version

print version information, then exit.

For locating files the Web2C programs use the path searching library Kpathsea (http://tug.org/kpathsea).
This library uses a combination of environment variables and a configuration files to optimize searching the
(huge) collection of TEX files. Web2C can look at many directory trees simultaneously, which is useful in
maintaining TEX’s standard distribution and local and personal extensions in distinct trees. To speed up file
searches, the root of each tree has a file ls-R, containing an entry showing the name and relative pathname for
all files under that root.

7.1 Kpathsea path searching

Let us first describe the generic path searching mechanism of the Kpathsea library.

We call a search path a colon- or semicolon-separated list of path elements, which are basically directory
names. A search path can come from (a combination of) many sources. To look up a file ‘my-file’ along a
path ‘.:/dir’, Kpathsea checks each element of the path in turn: first ./my-file, then /dir/my-file,
returning the first match (or possibly all matches).

In order to adapt optimally to all operating systems’ conventions, on non-Unix systems Kpathsea can use
filename separators different from colon (‘:’) and slash (‘/’).

To check a particular path element p, Kpathsea first checks if a prebuilt database (see “Filename database”
on page 65) applies to p, i.e., if the database is in a directory that is a prefix of p. If so, the path specification
is matched against the contents of the database.

If the database does not exist, or does not apply to this path element, or contains no matches, the
filesystem is searched (if this was not forbidden by a specification starting with ‘!!’ and if the file being
searched for must exist). Kpathsea constructs the list of directories that correspond to this path element, and
then checks in each for the file being sought.

The “file must exist” condition comes into play with ‘.vf’ files and input files read by TEX’s \openin
command. Such files may not exist (e.g., cmr10.vf), and so it would be wrong to search the disk for them.
Therefore, if you fail to update ls-R when you install a new ‘.vf’ file, it will never be found. Each path
element is checked in turn: first the database, then the disk. If a match is found, the search stops and the result
is returned.

Although the simplest and most common path element is a directory name, Kpathsea supports additional
features in search paths: layered default values, environment variable names, config file values, users’ home
directories, and recursive subdirectory searching. Thus, we say that Kpathsea expands a path element, meaning
it transforms all the specifications into basic directory name or names. This is described in the following
sections in the same order as it takes place.

Note that if the filename being searched for is absolute or explicitly relative, i.e., starts with ‘/’ or ‘./’ or
‘../’, Kpathsea simply checks if that file exists.

7.1.1 Path sources

A search path can come from many sources. In the order in which Kpathsea uses them:

A user-set environment variable, for instance, TEXINPUTS. Environment variables with a period
and a program name appended override; e.g., if ‘latex’ is the name of the program being run,
then TEXINPUTS.latex will override TEXINPUTS.

A program-specific configuration file, for example, a line ‘S /a:/b’ in dvips’s config.ps.

A Kpathsea configuration file texmf.cnf, containing a line like ‘TEXINPUTS=/c:/d’ (see below).

The compile-time default.

You can see each of these values for a given search path by using the debugging options (see “Debugging actions”
on page 68).

7.1.2 Config files

Kpathsea reads runtime configuration files named texmf.cnf for search path and other definitions. The search
path used to look for these files is named TEXMFCNF, but we do not recommend setting this (or any)
environment variable.

Instead, normal installation results in a file .../2016/texmf.cnf. If you must make changes to the
defaults (not normally necessary), this is the place to put them. The main configuration file is in
.../2016/texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf. You should not edit this latter file, as your changes will be lost
when the distributed version is updated.

All texmf.cnf files in the search path will be read and definitions in earlier files override those in later
files. For example, with a search path of .:$TEXMF, values from ./texmf.cnf override those from
$TEXMF/texmf.cnf.

Comments start with % and continue to the end of the line.

Blank lines are ignored.

A \ at the end of a line acts as a continuation character, i.e., the next line is appended. Whitespace
at the beginning of continuation lines is not ignored.

Each remaining line has the form:

variable[.progname] [=]value

where the ‘=’ and surrounding whitespace are optional.

The variable name may contain any character other than whitespace, ‘=’, or ‘.’, but sticking to ‘A-Za-z_’
is safest.

If ‘.progname’ is present, the definition only applies if the program that is running is named progname
or progname.exe. This allows different flavors of TEX to have different search paths, for
example.

value may contain any characters except % and ‘@’. The $var.prog feature is not available on the
right-hand side; instead, you must use an additional variable. A ‘;’ in value is translated to ‘:’ if
running under Unix; this is useful to be able to have a single texmf.cnf for Unix, MS-DOS and Windows
systems.

All definitions are read before anything is expanded, so variables can be referenced before they are
defined.

A configuration file fragment illustrating most of these points is shown below:

7.1.3 Path expansion

Kpathsea recognizes certain special characters and constructions in search paths, similar to those available in
Unix shells. As a general example, the complex path, ~$USER/{foo,bar}//baz, expands to all subdirectories
under directories foo and bar in $USER’s home directory that contain a directory or file baz. These expansions
are explained in the sections below.

7.1.4 Default expansion

If the highest-priority search path (see “Path sources” on page 60) contains an extra colon (i.e., leading,
trailing, or doubled), Kpathsea inserts at that point the next-highest-priority search path that is defined. If
that inserted path has an extra colon, the same happens with the next highest. For example, given an
environment variable setting

>setenv TEXINPUTS /home/karl:

and a TEXINPUTS value from texmf.cnf of

.:$TEXMF//tex

then the final value used for searching will be:

/home/karl:.:$TEXMF//tex

Since it would be useless to insert the default value in more than one place, Kpathsea changes only one
extra ‘:’ and leaves any others in place. It checks first for a leading ‘:’, then a trailing ‘:’, then a doubled
‘:’.

7.1.5 Brace expansion

A useful feature is brace expansion, which means that, for instance, v{a,b}w expands to vaw:vbw.
Nesting is allowed. This is used to implement multiple TEX hierarchies, by assigning a brace
list to $TEXMF. For example, in texmf.cnf, a definition like this (simplified for this example) is
made:

TEXMF = {$TEXMFVAR,$TEXMFHOME,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFDIST}

We can then use this to define, for example, the TEX input path:

TEXINPUTS = .;$TEXMF/tex//

which means that, after looking in the current directory, the $TEXMFVAR/tex, $TEXMFHOME/tex,
$TEXMFLOCAL/tex and $TEXMFDIST/tex trees only) will be searched (the last two using ls-R data base
files). It is a convenient way for running two parallel TEX structures, one “frozen” (on a CD, for
instance) and the other being continuously updated with new versions as they become available.
By using the $TEXMF variable in all definitions, one is sure to always search the up-to-date tree
first.

7.1.6 Subdirectory expansion

Two or more consecutive slashes in a path element following a directory d is replaced by all subdirectories of d:
first those subdirectories directly under d, then the subsubdirectories under those, and so on. At each level, the
order in which the directories are searched is unspecified.

If you specify any filename components after the ‘//’, only subdirectories with matching components are
included. For example, ‘/a//b’ expands into directories /a/1/b, /a/2/b, /a/1/1/b, and so on, but not /a/b/c
or /a/1.

Multiple ‘//’ constructs in a path are possible, but ‘//’ at the beginning of a path is ignored.

7.1.7 List of special characters and their meaning: a summary

The following list summarizes the special characters in Kpathsea configuration files.

:

Separator in path specification; at the beginning or the end of a path it substitutes the default
path expansion.

;

Separator on non-Unix systems (acts like :).

$

Variable expansion.

~

Represents the user’s home directory.

{...}

Brace expansion.

//

Subdirectory expansion (can occur anywhere in a path, except at its beginning).

%

Start of comment.

\

Continuation character (allows multi-line entries).

!!

Search only database to locate file, do not search the disk.

7.2 Filename databases

Kpathsea goes to some lengths to minimize disk accesses for searches. Nevertheless, at installations with
enough directories, searching each possible directory for a given file can take an excessively long time (this is
especially true if many hundreds of font directories have to be traversed.) Therefore, Kpathsea can use an
externally-built plain text “database” file named ls-R that maps files to directories, thus avoiding the need to
exhaustively search the disk.

A second database file aliases allows you to give additional names to the files listed in ls-R. This can be
helpful to confirm to DOS 8.3 filename conventions in source files.

7.2.1 The filename database

As explained above, the name of the main filename database must be ls-R. You can put one at the root of
each TEX hierarchy in your installation that you wish to be searched ($TEXMF by default). Kpathsea looks for
ls-R files along the TEXMFDBS path.

The recommended way to create and maintain ‘ls-R’ is to run the mktexlsr script included with the
distribution. It is invoked by the various ‘mktex’… scripts. In principle, this script just runs the command

cd/your/texmf/root &&\ls -1LAR ./ >ls-R

presuming your system’s ls produces the right output format (GNU ls is all right). To ensure
that the database is always up-to-date, it is easiest to rebuild it regularly via cron, so that it is
automatically updated when the installed files change, such as after installing or updating a LATEX
package.

If a file is not found in the database, by default Kpathsea goes ahead and searches the disk. If a particular
path element begins with ‘!!’, however, only the database will be searched for that element, never the
disk.

7.2.2 kpsewhich: Standalone path searching

The kpsewhich program exercises path searching independent of any particular application. This can be useful
as a sort of find program to locate files in TEX hierarchies (this is used heavily in the distributed
‘mktex’… scripts).

>kpsewhichoption…filename…

The options specified in option start with either ‘-’ or ‘--’, and any unambiguous abbreviation is
accepted.

Kpathsea looks up each non-option argument on the command line as a filename, and returns the first file
found. There is no option to return all the files with a particular name (you can run the Unix ‘find’ utility for
that).

The most common options are described next.

--dpi=num

Set the resolution to num; this only affects ‘gf’ and ‘pk’ lookups. ‘-D’ is a synonym, for
compatibility with dvips. Default is 600.

--format=name

Set the format for lookup to name. By default, the format is guessed from the filename. For
formats which do not have an associated unambiguous suffix, such as MetaPost support files and
dvips configuration files, you have to specify the name as known to Kpathsea, such as tex or encfiles. Run kpsewhich --help for a list.

--mode=string

Set the mode name to string; this only affects ‘gf’ and ‘pk’ lookups. No default: any mode will
be found.

--must-exist

Do everything possible to find the files, notably including searching the disk. By default, only the
ls-R database is checked, in the interest of efficiency.

--path=string

Search along the path string (colon-separated as usual), instead of guessing the search path from
the filename. ‘//’ and all the usual expansions are supported. The options ‘--path’ and ‘--format’
are mutually exclusive.

--progname=name

Set the program name to name. This can affect the search paths via the .progname feature. The
default is kpsewhich.

--show-path=name

shows the path used for file lookups of file type name. Either a filename extension (.pk, .vf, etc.)
or a name can be used, just as with ‘--format’ option.

--debug=num

sets the debugging options to num.

7.2.3 Examples of use

Let us now have a look at Kpathsea in action. Here’s a straightforward search:

We are looking for the file article.cls. Since the ‘.cls’ suffix is unambiguous we do not need to specify that
we want to look for a file of type tex (TEX source file directories). We find it in the subdirectory
tex/latex/base below the ‘texmf-dist’ TEX Live directory. Similarly, all of the following are found without
problems thanks to their unambiguous suffix.

By the way, that last is a BibTeX bibliography database for TUGboat articles.

>kpsewhich cmr10.pk

Font bitmap glyph files of type .pk are used by display programs like dvips and xdvi. Nothing is returned in
this case since there are no pre-generated Computer Modern ‘.pk’ files in TEX Live — the Type 1 variants are
used by default.

For these fonts (a phonetic alphabet from the University of Washington) we had to generate ‘.pk’ files, and
since the default Metafont mode on our installation is ljfour with a base resolution of 600dpi (dots per inch),
this instantiation is returned.

>kpsewhich -dpi=300 wsuipa10.pk

In this case, when specifying that we are interested in a resolution of 300dpi (-dpi=300) we see that no such
font is available on the system. A program like dvips or xdvi would go off and actually build the required .pk
files using the script mktexpk.

Next we turn our attention to dvips’s header and configuration files. We first look at one of the commonly
used files, the general prologue tex.pro for TEX support, before turning our attention to the generic
configuration file (config.ps) and the PostScript font map psfonts.map — as of 2004, map and encoding files
have their own search paths and new location in texmf trees. As the ‘.ps’ suffix is ambiguous we
have to specify explicitly which type we are considering (dvips config) for the file config.ps.

We now take a closer look at the URW Times PostScript support files. The prefix for these in the standard
font naming scheme is ‘utm’. The first file we look at is the configuration file, which contains the name of the
map file:

It should be evident from these examples how you can easily locate the whereabouts of a given file. This is
especially important if you suspect that the wrong version of a file is picked up somehow, since kpsewhich will
show you the first file encountered.

7.2.4 Debugging actions

Sometimes it is necessary to investigate how a program resolves file references. To make this practical,
Kpathsea offers various levels of debugging output:

1

stat calls (disk lookups). When running with an up-to-date ls-R database this should almost
give no output.

General path information for file types searched by Kpathsea. This is useful to find out where a
particular path for the file was defined.

16

Directory list for each path element (only relevant for searches on disk).

32

File searches.

64

Variable values.

A value of -1 will set all the above options; in practice, this is usually the most convenient.

Similarly, with the dvips program, by setting a combination of debug switches, one can follow in detail
where files are being picked up from. Alternatively, when a file is not found, the debug trace shows in
which directories the program looks for the given file, so that one can get an indication what the
problem is.

Generally speaking, as most programs call the Kpathsea library internally, one can select a debug option by
using the KPATHSEA_DEBUG environment variable, and setting it to (a combination of) values as described in the
above list.

(Note for Windows users: it is not easy to redirect all messages to a file in this system. For diagnostic
purposes you can temporarily SET KPATHSEA_DEBUG_OUTPUT=err.log).

Let us consider, as an example, a small LATEX source file, hello-world.tex, which contains the following
input.

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} Hello World! \end{document}

This little file only uses the font cmr10, so let us look at how dvips prepares the PostScript file
(we want to use the Type 1 version of the Computer Modern fonts, hence the option -Pcms).

dvips starts by locating its working files. First, texmf.cnf is found, which gives the definitions of the
search paths for the other files, then the file database ls-R (to optimize file searching) and the file
aliases, which makes it possible to declare several names (e.g., a short DOS-like 8.3 and a more
natural longer version) for the same file. Then dvips goes on to find the generic configuration file
config.ps before looking for the customization file .dvipsrc (which, in this case is not found).
Finally, dvips locates the config file for the Computer Modern PostScript fonts config.cms (this was
initiated with the -Pcms option on the dvips command). This file contains the list of the map
files which define the relation between the TEX, PostScript and file system names of the fonts.

dvips thus goes on to find all these files, plus the generic map file psfonts.map, which is always loaded (it
contains declarations for commonly used PostScript fonts; see the last part of Section 7.2.3 for more details
about PostScript map file handling).

After having found the file in question, dvips outputs the date and time, and informs us that it will generate
the file hello-world.ps, then that it needs the font file cmr10, and that the latter is declared as “resident” (no
bitmaps needed):

Now the search is on for the file cmr10.tfm, which is found, then a few more prolog files (not shown) are
referenced, and finally the Type 1 instance cmr10.pfb of the font is located and included in the output file
(see last line).

7.3 Runtime options

Another useful feature of Web2C is its possibility to control a number of memory parameters (in particular,
array sizes) via the runtime file texmf.cnf read by Kpathsea. The memory settings can be found in Part 3 of
that file in the TEX Live distribution. The more important are:

main_memory

Total words of memory available, for TEX, Metafont and MetaPost. You must make a new format
file for each different setting. For instance, you could generate a “huge” version of TEX, and call
the format file hugetex.fmt. Using the standard way of specifying the program name used by
Kpathsea, the particular value of the main_memory variable will then be read from texmf.cnf.

Number of words for font information available for TEX. This is more or less the total size of all
TFM files read.

hash_extra

Additional space for the hash table of control sequence names. Only ≈10,000 control sequences
can be stored in the main hash table; if you have a large book with numerous cross-references,
this might not be enough. The default value of hash_extra is 50000.

Of course, this facility is no substitute for truly dynamic arrays and memory allocation, but since these are
extremely difficult to implement in the present TEX source, these runtime parameters provide a practical
compromise allowing some flexibility.

8 Acknowledgements

TEX Live is a joint effort by virtually all of the TEX user groups. This edition of TEX Live was overseen by
Karl Berry. The other principal contributors, past and present, are listed below.

The CTAN team (http://ctan.org), which distributes the TEX Live images and provides the
common infrastructure for package updates, upon which TEX Live depends.

Nelson Beebe, for making many platforms available to TEX Live developers, and his own
comprehensive testing and unparalleled bibliographic efforts.

John Bowman, for making many changes to his advanced graphics program Asymptote to make
it work in TEX Live.

Peter Breitenlohner and the e-TEX team for the stable foundation of future TEX’s, and Peter
specifically for years of stellar help with GNU autotools and keeping sources up to date. Peter
passed away in October 2015, and we dedicate the continuing work to his memory.

Jin-Hwan Cho and all of the DVIPDFMx team, for their excellent driver and responsiveness to
configuration issues.

Thomas Esser, without whose marvelous teTEX package TEX Live would have never existed.

Michel Goossens, who co-authored the original documentation.

Eitan Gurari, whose TEX4ht is used to create the HTML version of this documentation, and who
worked tirelessly to improve it at short notice, every year. Eitan prematurely passed away in June
2009, and we dedicate this documentation to his memory.

Hans Hagen, for much testing and making his ConTEXt format (http://pragma-ade.com) work
within TEX Live’s framework.

Hàn Thế Thành, Martin Schröder, and the pdfTEX team (http://pdftex.org), for continuing
enhancements of TEX’s abilities.

Hartmut Henkel, for significant development contributions to pdfTEX LuaTEX, and more.

Taco Hoekwater,
for major renewed development efforts on MetaPost and (Lua)TEX (http://luatex.org) itself,
incorporating ConTEXt into TEX Live, giving Kpathsea multi-threaded functionality, and much
more.

Khaled Hosny, for substantial work on XeTEX, DVIPDFMx, and efforts with Arabic and other
fonts.

Paweł Jackowski, for the Windows installer tlpm, and Tomasz Łuczak, for tlpmgui, used in past
releases.

Akira Kakuto, for providing the Windows binaries from his W32TEX distribution for Japanese
TEX (http://w32tex.org), and many other development contributions.

Jonathan Kew, for developing the remarkable XeTEX engine and taking the time and trouble to
integrate it in TEX Live, as well as the initial version of the MacTEX installer, and also for our
recommended front-end TEXworks.

Dick Koch, for maintaining MacTEX (http://tug.org/mactex) in very close tandem with TEX
Live, and for his great good cheer in doing so.

Reinhard Kotucha, for major contributions to the TEX Live 2008 infrastructure and installer, as
well as Windows research efforts, the getnonfreefonts script, and more.

Siep Kroonenberg, also for major contributions to the TEX Live 2008 infrastructure and installer,
especially on Windows, and for the bulk of work updating this manual describing those features.

Mojca Miklavec, for much help with ConTEXt.

Heiko Oberdiek, for the epstopdf package and many others, compressing the huge pst-geo data
files so we could include them, and most of all, for his remarkable work on hyperref.

Petr Olšak, who coordinated and checked all the Czech and Slovak material very carefully.

Fabrice Popineau, for the original Windows support in TEX Live and work on the French
documentation.

Norbert Preining, the principal architect of the TEX Live 2008 infrastructure and installer, and
also for coordinating the Debian version of TEX Live (together with Frank Küster), making many
suggestions along the way.

Sebastian Rahtz, for originally creating TEX Live and maintaining it for many years. Sebastian
passed away in March 2016, and we dedicate the continuing work to his memory.

Luigi Scarso, for continuing development of MetaPost, LuaTEX, and more.

Tomasz Trzeciak, for wide-ranging help with Windows.

Vladimir Volovich, for substantial help with porting and other maintenance issues, and especially
for making it feasible to include xindy.

Staszek Wawrykiewicz, the principal tester for all of TEX Live, and coordinator of the many
major Polish contributions: fonts, Windows installation, and more.

Olaf Weber, for his patient maintenance of Web2C in past years.

Gerben Wierda, for creating and maintaining the original Mac OS X support.

Of course the most important acknowledgement must go to Donald Knuth, first for inventing TEX, and
then for giving it to the world.

9 Release history

9.1 Past

Discussion began in late 1993 when the Dutch TEX Users Group was starting work on its 4AllTEX CD for
MS-DOS users, and it was hoped at that time to issue a single, rational, CD for all systems. This was too
ambitious a target for the time, but it did spawn not only the very successful 4AllTEX CD, but also the TUG
Technical Council working group on a TEXDirectory Structure (http://tug.org/tds), which specified how
to create consistent and manageable collections of TEX support files. A complete draft of the TDS was
published in the December 1995 issue of TUGboat, and it was clear from an early stage that one desirable
product would be a model structure on CD. The distribution you now have is a very direct result of the
working group’s deliberations. It was also clear that the success of the 4AllTEX CD showed that
Unix users would benefit from a similarly easy system, and this is the other main strand of TEX
Live.

We first undertook to make a new Unix-based TDS CD in the autumn of 1995, and quickly identified
Thomas Esser’s teTEX as the ideal setup, as it already had multi-platform support and was built with
portability across file systems in mind. Thomas agreed to help, and work began seriously at the start of 1996.
The first edition was released in May 1996. At the start of 1997, Karl Berry completed a major new
release of Web2c, which included nearly all the features which Thomas Esser had added in teTEX,
and we decided to base the 2nd edition of the CD on the standard Web2C, with the addition of
teTEX’s texconfig script. The 3rd edition of the CD was based on a major revision of Web2C,
7.2, by Olaf Weber; at the same time, a new revision of teTEX was being made, and TEX Live
included almost all of its features. The 4th edition followed the same pattern, using a new version
of teTEX, and a new release of Web2C (7.3). The system now included a complete Windows
setup.

For the 5th edition (March 2000) many parts of the CD were revised and checked, updating hundreds of
packages. Package details were stored in XML files. But the major change for TEX Live 5 was that all
non-free software was removed. Everything in TEX Live is now intended to be compatible with the
Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://www.debian.org/intro/free); we have done our best to
check the license conditions of all packages, but we would very much appreciate hearing of any
mistakes.

The 6th edition (July 2001) had much more material updated. The major change was a new install concept:
the user could select a more exact set of needed collections. Language-related collections were completely
reorganized, so selecting any of them installs not only macros, fonts, etc., but also prepares an appropriate
language.dat.

The 7th edition of 2002 had the notable addition of Mac OS X support, and the usual myriad of updates to
all sorts of packages and programs. An important goal was integration of the source back with teTEX, to
correct the drift apart in versions 5 and 6.

9.1.1 2003

In 2003, with the continuing flood of updates and additions, we found that TEX Live had grown so large it
could no longer be contained on a single CD, so we split it into three different distributions (see section 2.1,
p. 7). In addition:

At the request of the LATEX team, we changed the standard latex and pdflatex commands to
now use e-TEX (see p. 10).

The new Latin Modern fonts were included (and are recommended).

Support for Alpha OSF was removed (HPUX support was removed previously), since no one had
(or volunteered) hardware available on which to compile new binaries.

Windows setup was substantially changed; for the first time an integrated environment based on
XEmacs was introduced.

Important supplementary programs for Windows (Perl, Ghostscript, ImageMagick, Ispell) are now
installed in the TEX Live installation directory.

Font map files used by dvips, dvipdfm and pdftex are now generated by the new program updmap
and installed into texmf/fonts/map.

TEX, Metafont, and MetaPost now, by default, output most input characters (32 and above) as
themselves in output (e.g., \write) files, log files, and the terminal, i.e., not translated using the
^^ notation. In TEX Live 7, this translation was dependent on the system locale settings; now,
locale settings do not influence the TEX programs’ behavior. If for some reason you need the
^^ output, rename the file texmf/web2c/cp8bit.tcx. (Future releases will have cleaner ways to
control this.)

This documentation was substantially revised.

Finally, since the edition numbers had grown unwieldy, the version is now simply identified by the
year: TEX Live 2003.

9.1.2 2004

2004 saw many changes:

If you have locally-installed fonts which use their own .map or (much less likely) .enc support
files, you may need to move those support files.

.map files are now searched for in subdirectories of fonts/map only (in each texmf tree), along
the TEXFONTMAPS path. Similarly, .enc files are now searched for in subdirectories of fonts/enc
only, along the ENCFONTS path. updmap will attempt to warn about problematic files.

Helper scripts (not meant to be invoked by users) are now located in a new scripts
subdirectory of texmf* trees, and can be searched for via kpsewhich -format=texmfscripts.
So if you have programs which call such scripts, they’ll need to be adjusted. See
texmf-dist/doc/generic/tds/tds.html#Scripts.

Almost all formats leave most characters printable as themselves via the “translation file”
cp227.tcx, instead of translating them with the ^^ notation. Specifically, characters at
positions 32–256, plus tab, vertical tab, and form feed are considered printable and not
translated. The exceptions are plain TEX (only 32–126 printable), ConTEXt (0–255 printable),
and the Omega-related formats. This default behavior is almost the same as in TEX Live
2003, but it’s implemented more cleanly, with more possibilities for customization. See
texmf-dist/doc/web2c/web2c.html#TCX-files. (By the way, with Unicode input, TEX may
output partial character sequences when showing error contexts, since it is byte-oriented.)

pdfetex is now the default engine for all formats except (plain) tex itself. (Of course it generates
DVI when run as latex, etc.) This means, among other things, that the microtypographic
features of pdftex are available in LATEX, ConTEXt, etc., as well as the e-TEX features
(texmf-dist/doc/etex/base/).

It also means it’s more important than ever to use the ifpdf package (works with both plain and
LATEX) or equivalent code, because simply testing whether \pdfoutput or some other primitive
is defined is not a reliable way to determine if PDF output is being generated. We made this
backward compatible as best we could this year, but next year, \pdfoutput may be defined even
when DVI is being written.

All parameters previously set through the special configuration file pdftex.cfg must now be
set through primitives, typically in pdftexconfig.tex; pdftex.cfg is no longer supported.
Any extant .fmt files must be redumped when pdftexconfig.tex is changed.

We reduced the cbgreek package to a “medium” sized set of fonts, with the assent and advice of the
author (Claudio Beccari). The excised fonts are the invisible, outline, and transparency ones, which are
relatively rarely used, and we needed the space. The full set is of course available from CTAN
(http://mirror.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/greek/cbfonts).

oxdvi has been removed; just use xdvi.

The ini and vir commands (links) for tex, mf, and mpost are no longer created, such as initex.
The ini functionality has been available through the command-line option -ini for years
now.

i386-openbsd platform support was removed. Since the tetex package in the BSD Ports system is
available, and GNU/Linux and FreeBSD binaries were available, it seemed volunteer time could be better
spent elsewhere.

On sparc-solaris (at least), you may have to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to run the
t1utils programs. This is because they are compiled with C++, and there is no standard location for the
runtime libraries. (This is not new in 2004, but wasn’t previously documented.) Similarly, on mips-irix,
the MIPSpro 7.4 runtimes are required.

9.1.3 2005

2005 saw the usual huge number of updates to packages and programs. The infrastructure stayed relatively
stable from 2004, but inevitably there were some changes there as well:

New scripts texconfig-sys, updmap-sys, and fmtutil-sys were introduced, which modify the
configuration in the system trees. The texconfig, updmap, and fmtutil scripts now modify
user-specific files, under $HOME/.texlive2005.

Corresponding new variables TEXMFCONFIG and TEXMFSYSCONFIG to specify the trees where
configuration files (user or system, respectively) are found. Thus, you may need to move
personal versions of fmtutil.cnf and updmap.cfg to these places; another option is to redefine
TEXMFCONFIG or TEXMFSYSCONFIG in texmf.cnf. In any case the real location of these files and
the values of TEXMFCONFIG and TEXMFSYSCONFIG must agree. See section 2.3, p. 8.

Last year, we kept \pdfoutput and other primitives undefined for DVI output, even though the
pdfetex program was being used. This year, as promised, we undid that compatibility measure. So
if your document uses \ifx\pdfoutput\undefined to test if PDF is being output, it will need to
be changed. You can use the package ifpdf.sty (which works under both plain TEX and LATEX)
to do this, or steal its logic.

Last year, we changed most formats to output (8-bit) characters as themselves (see previous section).
The new TCX file empty.tcx now provides an easier way to get the original ^^ notation if you so desire,
as in:

latex --translate-file=empty.tcx yourfile.tex

The new program dvipdfmx is included for translation of DVI to PDF; this is an actively maintained
update of dvipdfm (which is also still available for now, though no longer recommended).

The new programs pdfopen and pdfclose are included to allow reloading of PDF files in the Adobe
Acrobat Reader without restarting the program. (Other PDF readers, notably xpdf, gv, and gsview, have
never suffered from this problem.)

For consistency, the variables HOMETEXMF and VARTEXMF have been renamed to TEXMFHOME and
TEXMFSYSVAR, respectively. There is also TEXMFVAR, which is by default user-specific. See the first point
above.

9.1.4 2006–2007

In 2006–2007, the major new addition to TEX Live was the XeTEX program, available as the xetex and
xelatex programs; see http://scripts.sil.org/xetex.

The TEX.fmt (high-speed format) and the similar files for MetaPost and Metafont are now stored in
subdirectories of texmf/web2c, instead of in the directory itself (although the directory is still searched, for the
sake of existing .fmt’s). The subdirectories are named for the ‘engine’ in use, such as tex or pdftex or xetex.
This change should be invisible in normal use.

The (plain) tex program no longer reads %& first lines to determine what format to run; it is the pure
Knuthian TEX. (LATEX and everything else do still read %& lines).

Of course the year also saw (the usual) hundreds of other updates to packages and programs. As usual,
please check CTAN (http://mirror.ctan.org) for updates.

Internally, the source tree is now stored in Subversion, with a standard web interface for viewing the tree,
as linked from our home page. Although not visible in the final distribution, we expect this will provide a
stable development foundation for future years.

Finally, in May 2006 Thomas Esser announced that he would no longer be updating teTEX
(http://tug.org/tetex). As a result, there was been a surge of interest in TEX Live, especially among
GNU/Linux distributors. (There is a new tetex installation scheme in TEX Live, which provides an
approximate equivalent.) We hope this will eventually translate to improvements in the TEX environment for
everyone.

9.1.5 2008

In 2008, the entire TEX Live infrastructure was redesigned and reimplemented. Complete information about
an installation is now stored in a plain text file tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb.

Among other things, this finally makes possible upgrading a TEX Live installation over the Internet after
the initial installation, a feature MiKTEX has provided for many years. We expect to regularly update new
packages as they are released to CTAN.

The major new engine LuaTEX (http://luatex.org) is included; besides a new level of flexibility
in typesetting, this provides an excellent scripting language for use both inside and outside of
TEX documents.

Support among Windows and the Unix-based platforms is now much more uniform. In particular, most
Perl and Lua scripts are now available on Windows, using the Perl internally distributed with TEX
Live.

The new tlmgr script (section 5) is the general interface for managing TEX Live after the initial
installation. It handles package updates and consequent regeneration of formats, map files, and language files,
optionally including local additions.

With the advent of tlmgr, the texconfig actions to edit the format and hyphenation configuration files are
now disabled.

The kpsewhich tool can now report all matches for a given file (option –all) and limit matches to a given
subdirectory (option –subdir).

The dvipdfmx program now includes functionality to extract bounding box information, via the command
name extractbb; this was one of the last features provided by dvipdfm not in dvipdfmx.

The font aliases Times-Roman, Helvetica, and so on have been removed. Different packages expected them
to behave differently (in particular, to have different encodings), and there was no good way to resolve
this.

The platex format has been removed, to resolve a name conflict with a completely different Japanese platex;
the polski package is now the main Polish support.

Internally, the WEB string pool files are now compiled into the binaries, to ease upgrades.

9.1.6 2009

In 2009, the default output format for Lua(LA )TEX is now PDF, to take advantage of LuaTEX’s OpenType
support, et al. New executables named dviluatex and dvilualatex run LuaTEX with DVI output. The
LuaTEX home page is http://luatex.org.

The original Omega engine and Lambda format have been excised, after discussions with the Omega
authors. The updated Aleph and Lamed remain, as do the Omega utilities.

The new GUI front end TEXworks is included for Windows, and also in MacTEX. For other platforms, and
more information, see the TEXworks home page, http://tug.org/texworks. It is a cross-platform front end
inspired by the Mac OS X TeXShop editor, aiming at ease-of-use.

The graphics program Asymptote is included for several platforms. This implements a text-based graphics
description language vaguely akin to MetaPost, but with advanced 3D support and other features. Its home
page is http://asymptote.sourceforge.net.

The separate dvipdfm program has been replaced by dvipdfmx, which operates in a special compatibility
mode under that name. dvipdfmx includes CJK support and has accumulated many other fixes over the years
since the last dvipdfm release.

Executables for the cygwin and i386-netbsd platforms are now included, while we were advised that
OpenBSD users get TEX through their package systems, plus there were difficulties in making binaries that
have a chance of working on more than one version.

A miscellany of smaller changes: we now use xz compression, the stable replacement for lzma
(http://tukaani.org/xz/); a literal $ is allowed in filenames when it does not introduce a known variable
name; the Kpathsea library is now multi-threaded (made use of in MetaPost); the entire TEX Live build is
now based on Automake.

9.1.7 2010

In 2010, the default version for PDF output is now 1.5, enabling more compression. This applies to all the
TEX engines when used to produce PDF and to dvipdfmx. Loading the pdf14 LATEX package changes back
to PDF 1.4, or set \pdfminorversion=4.

pdf(LA )TEX now automatically converts a requested Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file to PDF, via the
epstopdf package, when and if the LATEXgraphics.cfg configuration file is loaded, and PDF is
being output. The default options are intended to eliminate any chance of hand-created PDF
files being overwritten, but you can also prevent epstopdf from being loaded at all by putting
\newcommand{\DoNotLoadEpstopdf}{} (or \def...) before the \documentclass declaration. It is also not
loaded if the pst-pdf package is used. For more details, see the epstopdf package documentation
(http://ctan.org/pkg/epstopdf-pkg).

A related change is that execution of a very few external commands from TEX, via the \write18 feature, is
now enabled by default. These are commands are repstopdf, makeindex, kpsewhich, bibtex, and bibtex8;
the list is defined in texmf.cnf. Environments which must disallow all such external commands can deselect
this option in the installer (see section 3.2.4), or override the value after installation by running
tlmgr conf texmf shell_escape 0.

Yet another related change is that BibTeX and Makeindex now refuse to write their output files to an
arbitrary directory (like TEX itself), by default. This is so they can now be enabled for use by the restricted
\write18. To change this, the TEXMFOUTPUT environment variable can be set, or the openout_any setting
changed.

XeTEX now supports margin kerning along the same lines as pdfTEX. (Font expansion is not presently
supported.)

By default, tlmgr now saves one backup of each package updated (tlmgr option autobackup 1), so
broken packages updates can be easily reverted with tlmgr restore. If you do post-install updates, and don’t
have the disk space for the backups, run tlmgr option autobackup 0.

Executables for these new platforms are now included: amd64-freebsd, amd64-kfreebsd, i386-freebsd,
i386-kfreebsd, x86_64-darwin, x86_64-solaris.

A change in TEX Live 2009 that we failed to note: numerous TEX4ht-related executables
(http://tug.org/tex4ht) were removed from the binary directories. The generic mk4ht program can be used
to run any of the various tex4ht combinations.

Finally, the TEX Live release on the TEX Collection DVD can no longer be run live (oddly enough). A
single DVD no longer has enough room. One beneficial side effect is that installation from the physical
DVD is much faster.

9.1.8 2011

The Mac OS X binaries (universal-darwin and x86_64-darwin) now work only on Leopard or later; Panther
and Tiger are no longer supported.

The biber program for bibliography processing is included on common platforms. Its development is
closely coupled with the biblatex package, which completely reimplements the bibliographical facilities
provided by LaTeX.

The MetaPost (mpost) program no longer creates or uses .mem files. The needed files, such as plain.mp, are
simply read on every run. This is related to supporting MetaPost as a library, which is another significant
though not user-visible change.

The updmap implementation in Perl, previously used only on Windows, has been revamped and is now used
on all platforms. There shouldn’t be any user-visible changes as a result, except that it runs much
faster.

The initex and inimf programs were restored (but no other ini* variants).

9.1.9 2012

tlmgr supports updates from multiple network repositories. The section on multiple repositories in the tlmgrhelp output has more.

The parameter \XeTeXdashbreakstate is set to 1 by default, for both xetex and xelatex. This allows line
breaks after em-dashes and en-dashes, which has always been the behavior of plain TEX, LATEX, LuaTEX,
etc. Existing XeTEX documents which must retain perfect line-break compatibility will need to set
\XeTeXdashbreakstate to 0 explicitly.

The output files generated by pdftex and dvips, among others, can now exceed 2gb.

The 35 standard PostScript fonts are included in the output of dvips by default, since so many different
versions of them are extant.

In the restricted \write18 execution mode, set by default, mpost is now an allowed program.

A texmf.cnf file is also found in ../texmf-local, e.g., /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c/texmf.cnf, if
it exists.

The updmap script reads a per-tree updmap.cfg instead of one global config. This change should be
invisible, unless you edited your updmap.cfg’s directly. The updmap --help output has more.

Platforms: armel-linux and mipsel-linux added; sparc-linux and i386-netbsd are no longer in the main
distribution.

9.1.10 2013

Distribution layout: the top-level texmf/ directory has been merged into texmf-dist/, for simplicity. Both the
TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFDIST Kpathsea variables now point to texmf-dist.

Many small language collections have been merged together, to simplify installation.

MetaPost: native support for PNG output and floating-point (IEEE double) has been added.

LuaTEX: updated to Lua 5.2, and includes a new library (pdfscanner) to process external PDF page
content, among much else (see its web pages).

XeTEX (also see its web pages for more):

The HarfBuzz library now used for font layout instead of ICU. (ICU is still used to support input
encodings, bidirectionality, and the optional Unicode line breaking.)

Graphite2 and HarfBuzz are used instead of SilGraphite for Graphite layout.

On Macs, Core Text is used instead of the (deprecated) ATSUI.

Prefer TrueType/OpenType fonts to Type1 when the names are the same.

Fix occasional mismatch in font finding between XeTEX and xdvipdfmx.

Support OpenType math cut-ins.

xdvi: now uses FreeType instead of t1lib for rendering.

microtype.sty: some support for XeTEX (protrusion) and LuaTEX (protrusion, font expansion, tracking),
among other enhancements.

9.1.11 2014

2014 saw another TEX tune-up from Knuth; this affected all engines, but the only visible change likely is the
restoration of the preloaded format string on the banner line. Per Knuth, this now reflects the format that
would be loaded by default, rather than an undumped format that is actually preloaded in the binary; it may
be overridden in various ways.

pdfTEX: new warning-suppression parameter \pdfsuppresswarningpagegroup; new primitives for fake
interword spaces to help with PDF text reflowing: \pdfinterwordspaceon, \pdfinterwordspaceoff,
\pdffakespace.

LuaTEX: Notable changes and fixes were made to font loading and hyphenation. The biggest addition is a
new engine variant, luajittex (http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/luajittex) and its siblings
texluajit and texluajitc. This uses a just-in-time Lua compiler (detailed TUGboat article
at http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb34-1/tb106scarso.pdf). luajittex is still in development, is
not available on all platforms, and is considerably less stable than luatex. Neither we nor its
developers recommend using it except for the specific purpose of experimenting with jit on Lua
code.

XeTEX: The same image formats are now supported on all platforms (including Mac); avoid Unicode
compatibility decomposition fallback (but not other variants); prefer OpenType to Graphite fonts, for
compatibility with previous XeTEX versions.

MetaPost: A new numbersystem decimal is supported, along with a companion internal numberprecision;
a new definition of drawdot in plain.mp, per Knuth; bug fixes in SVG and PNG output, among
others.

The pstopdf ConTEXt utility will be removed as a standalone command at some point after the release,
due to conflicts with OS utilities of the same name. It can still (and now) be invoked as mtxrun –scriptpstopdf.

psutils has been substantially revised by a new maintainer. As a result, several seldom-used utilities (fix*,
getafm, psmerge, showchar) are now only in the scripts/ directory rather than being user-level
executables (this can be reversed if it turns out to be problematic). A new script, psjoin, has been
added.

The MacTEX redistribution of TEX Live (section 3.1.2) no longer includes the optional Mac-only
packages for the Latin Modern and TEX Gyre fonts, since it is easy enough for individual users to make them
available to the system. The convert program from ImageMagick has also been excised, since TEX4ht
(specifically tex4ht.env) now uses Ghostscript directly.

The langcjk collection for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean support has been split into individual language
collections for the sake of more moderate sizes.

9.1.12 2015

LaTeX2e now incorporates, by default, changes previously included only by explicitly loading the fixltx2e
package, which is now a no-op. A new latexrelease package and other mechanisms allow for controlling what is
done. The included LATEX News #22 and “LATEX changes” documents have details. Incidentally, the babel
and psnfss packages, while core parts of LATEX, are maintained separately and are not affected by these
changes (and should still work).

Internally, LaTeX2e now includes Unicode-related engine configuration (what characters are letters,
naming of primitives, etc.) which was previously part of TEX Live. This change is intended to be invisible to
users; a few low-level internal control sequences have been renamed or removed, but the behavior should be
just the same.

pdfTEX: Support JPEG Exif as well as JFIF; do not emit a warning if \pdfinclusionerrorlevel is
negative; sync with xpdf 3.04.

LuaTEX: New library newtokenlib for scanning tokens; bug fixes in the normal random number generator
and other places.

MetaPost: New numbersystem binary; new Japanese-enabled upmpost and updvitomp programs, analogous
to up*tex.

MacTEX: Updates to the included Ghostscript package for CJK support. The TEX Distribution
Preference Pane now works in Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10). Resource-fork font suitcases (generally
without an extension) are no longer supported by XeTEX; data-fork suitcases (.dfont) remain
supported.

Infrastructure: The fmtutil script has been reimplemented to read fmtutil.cnf on a per-tree basis,
analogous to updmap. Web2C mktex* scripts (including mktexlsr, mktextfm, mktexpk) now prefer programs in
their own directory, instead of always using the existing PATH.

Platforms: *-kfreebsd removed, since TEX Live is now easily available through the system
platform mechanisms. Support for some additional platforms is available as custom binaries
(http://tug.org/texlive/custom-bin.html). In addition, some platforms are now omitted from the
DVD (simply to save space), but can be installed normally over the net.

SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support in all engines except LuaTEX (which will come in the next release) and
original tex (intentionally omitted): if the environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set, its value is used for
timestamps in the PDF output. If SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH_TEX_PRIMITIVES is also set, the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
value is used to initialize the TEX primitives \year, \month, \day, \time. The pdfTEX manual has examples
and details.

pdfTEX: new primitives \pdfinfoomitdate, \pdftrailerid, \pdfsuppressptexinfo, to control values
appearing in the output which normally change with each run. These features are for PDF output only, not
DVI.

gregorio is a new program, part of the gregoriotex package for typesetting Gregorian chant
scores; it is included in shell_escape_commands by default.

upmendex is an index creation program, mostly compatible with makeindex, with support for
Unicode sorting, among other changes.

afm2tfm now makes only accent-based height adjustments upward; a new option -a omits all
adjustments.

ps2pk can handle extended PK/GF fonts.

MacTEX: The TEX Distribution Preference Pane is gone; its functionality is now in TeX Live Utility;
bundled GUI applications upgraded; new script cjk-gs-integrate to be run by users who wish to incorporate
various CJK fonts into Ghostscript.

Infrastructure: System-level tlmgr configuration file supported; verify package checksums; if GPG is
available, verify signature of network updates. These checks happen with both the installer and +tlmgr. (If
GPG is not available, updates proceed as usual.)

Platforms: alpha-linux and mipsel-linux removed.

9.3 Future

TEXLive is not perfect! (And never will be.) We intend to continue to release new versions, and would like to
provide more help material, more utilities, more installation programs, and (of course) an ever-improved and
better-checked tree of macros and fonts. This work is all done by volunteers in their spare time, and so there is
always more to do. Please see http://tug.org/texlive/contribute.html.